Is Duplicate Content So Bad?

What about parsing RSS feeds and include the title of the original article (with your sitename added), 80 characters of the description (from the feed) and putting a link back to the original article (like: a "read more" link). Does Google like that ?
I have a adsense website in a small niche that is ranking for a lot of longtails and some important keywords as well, with this technique for over 4 years now.

It this considered duplicated content ?
 
Secondly: are hand rewritten PLR articles considered duplicate content (say 15% rewritten) ?
 
Duplicate content is not good at all. Your website will be punished by Google soon.
 
Duplicate is not bad for seo.

It is bad becuse you can use Adsense on it, you can index well.

Then you get to this point, ask yourself, why do you add those post, for what reason?
 
For a new sites don't use spun articles it will affect in the terms of traffic. We don't use spun articles on our sites at any cost. Still you can submit your articles on legit sites.
 
A lot of people get this wrong. Yes original content would always be preferable, but duplicate content can rank...... the key is to add more or different value to your visitors from the original.
 
A lot of people get this wrong. Yes original content would always be preferable, but duplicate content can rank...... the key is to add more or different value to your visitors from the original.

How would you add more of different value to your visitors with the same content?

People aren't getting this wrong. SEO is about best practice and using unique content is best practice. Why would you waste your time trying to rank duplicate content when you can spend that time ranking unique content?
 
OK chaps I understand what you are saying, but please check my OP. I am not trying to rank the pages with the duplicate content, I just want to rank the home page of the site. The extra pages with the ezine articles are there only to show G the exact nature of the site, and that it has relevant content. The home page has unique, quality content, and that is the page I want to rank in the SERPS. Duplicate content is all over the web, it's unavoidable, so I am asking if it is such a bad thing, providing you don't want to actually rank the pages that have the duplicate content.

In essence, my site is a one-page, single keyword site, but I just thought it would be better to have extra pages with proper, relevant content - even if it is duplicate - rather than a single page which may look worthless in G's eyes. Of course if I deem it necessary I will rewrite those extra articles to make them unique, but if I don't actually need to do that, it will save a lot of time and effort.
 
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The home page has unique, quality content, and that is the page I want to rank in the SERPS.

It doesn't matter. The duplicate content that you have wont help you rank the index at all. This is an easy part of SEO to understand, but hard to explain on a forum but I'll give it my best.

Lets say I want to rank my website for 'Dog collars'. I could just write one article about dog collars, telling everyone that I sell them, mine are the best ect... but it won't do very well against my competition that has an article to the same effect, plus 20 other article explaining different aspects of dog collars.

So, in terms of gaining authority, I've done 10% of the job by having 1 article, but my competition has displayed a far deeper knowledge of dog collars. Because my competition has displayed a far deeper understanding of dog collars, Google is likely to rank their website higher than mine in the SERPS.

As for the duplicate content, Google will ignore it when determining your rankings because it doesn't display any knowledge about the topic on your part. The only thing it shows to Google is that you can copy & paste.

In summary, use unique content at all times.
 
Duplicate content is harmful for your site. Do you have any idea about Google penalty? It may cause you Google penalty and your page rank will down over night. You have to use unique articles and contents on your site.
 
Interested in this thread as well. And maybe I don't understand "curated" content. After all, isn't that what sites like Huff Post etc do? Use other people's content from around the web?
 
Interested in this thread as well. And maybe I don't understand "curated" content. After all, isn't that what sites like Huff Post etc do? Use other people's content from around the web?
Yes, and this was my point. Doesn't seem to do them any harm does it?
 
Actually I've just built a website in which every post has virtually the same content. So I guess it's actually even worse than copying content from other sources. Will see how this one perform in a couple of month :)
 
Yes, and this was my point. Doesn't seem to do them any harm does it?

News sites sure make content that were picked up from other sites quite often. And sure Google throws all these similar content high in the SERPs.

The point to note is that these are not duplicate content, the content are re-written sometimes from a fairly different view point and credit original sources as well.
 
Im of the opinion that its better to spend the time or money on new, unique content that provides value instead trying to trick the engines. When you invest in content your site and seo becomes a long term thing, you might be able to rank with duplicate content but your putting yourself at risk if you want to stay ranking for a long time


I really wonder what people like you are doing on a BH forum, seriously.....
 
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